1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved method for harmonic ultrasound imaging using a contrast agent specially designed to return harmonic frequencies.
2. Background of the Art
Ultrasound technology provides an important and more economical alternative to imaging techniques which use ionizing radiation. While numerous conventional imaging technologies are available, e.g., magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, computerized tomography (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET), each of these techniques use extremely expensive equipment. Moreover, CT and PET utilize ionizing radiation. Unlike these other technologies, ultrasound imaging equipment is relatively inexpensive. Moreover, ultrasound imaging does not use ionizing radiation.
In using the ultrasound technique, sound waves are transmitted into an object or patient via a transducer. As the sound waves propagate through the object or body, they are either reflected or absorbed by tissues and fluids. Reflected sound waves are detected by a receiver and processed to form an image. The acoustic properties of the tissues and fluids determine the contrast which appears in the resulting image.
Ultrasound imaging therefore makes use of differences in tissue density and composition that affect the reflection of sound waves by those tissues. Images are especially sharp where there are distinct variations in tissue density or compressibility, such as at tissue interfaces. Interfaces between solid tissues, the skeletal system, and various organs and/or tumors are readily imaged with ultrasound.
Accordingly, in many imaging applications ultrasound performs suitably without use of contrast enhancement agents; however, for other applications, such as visualization of flowing blood in tissues, there have been ongoing efforts to develop agents to provide contrast enhancement. One particularly significant application for such contrast agents is in the area of vascular imaging. Such ultrasound contrast agents could improve imaging of flowing blood in the heart, kidneys, lungs, and other tissues. This, in turn, would facilitate research, diagnosis, surgery, and therapy related to the imaged tissues. A blood pool contrast agent would also allow imaging on the basis of blood content (e.g., tumors and inflamed tissues) and would aid in the visualization of the placenta and fetus by enhancing only the maternal circulation.
A variety of ultrasound contrast enhancement agents have been proposed. The most successful agents have generally consisted of microbubbles that can be injected intravenously. In their simplest embodiment, microbubbles are miniature bubbles containing a gas, such as air, and are formed through the use of foaming agents, surfactants, or encapsulating agents. The microbubbles then provide a physical object in the flowing blood that is of a different density and a much higher compressibility than the surrounding fluid tissue and blood. As a result, these microbubbles can easily be imaged with ultrasound.
However, contrast agents developed thus far for use in ultrasound imaging have various problems. Contrast agents containing aqueous protein solutions require use of a foreign protein which may be antigenic and potentially toxic. Liposomal contrast agents, consisting of liposomes having gas encapsulated therein, present problems due to uneven size distribution and poor stability. Many of the existing contrast agents have failed to provide improved imaging, and furthermore, many of the methods used to prepare the contrast agents are inefficient, expensive, and otherwise unsatisfactory.
Conventional ultrasound systems work by transmitting pulses of ultrasound of a given frequency and measuring the time interval between this transmission and the detection of the reflected echoes from within the object or body being imaged. Large numbers of microbubbles behave collectively as a large reflector. The system relies on measurement of reflected sound waves of the same frequency as that transmitted to produce the image.
It has been found to be advantageous, especially in biological applications, to detect or image an ultrasound contrast agent while suppressing the ultrasound signal reflected by other objects such as tissue and bone (see Williams et al., WO 91/15999). The ability to image ultrasound contrast agent bubbles in the blood by detecting harmonic frequencies in the echo when they are excited by an ultrasound beam at a different frequency (the fundamental) greatly increases the sensitivity of contrast agent detection by ignoring the background fundamental frequency signal scattered by other non-bubble objects in the organism, much like the detection of fluorescent dyes by their frequency-shifted light is inherently more sensitive than the detection of light-absorbing dyes by their modulation of the illuminating light intensity. Unlike microbubbles, animal tissues return very little harmonic frequencies. Thus, background imaging is substantially eliminated through harmonic imaging.
As existing contrast enhancing agents and methods for ultrasound imaging have not been found to be entirely satisfactory, there is a substantial need for providing an improved ultrasound contrast agent and method of ultrasound imaging which results in the production of improved ultrasound images.